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Tuesday, July 15, 2014

The Ethics and Hard Work of Sharon Fichman

While most tennis fans are probably associating
Canada
with the rising star of Eugenie Bouchard, the Canadians are witnessing the
constant improvement of a former very promising junior, who is now proving
herself in the big tour: Sharon Fichman.

The 23 year old girl from Toronto has this year reached her career’s
best ranking at world number 77, confirming once again her constant improvement
over the years.

She made her top 100 debut during this 2014 and
she clearly means to stay, as her results keep improving week after week. In a
lovely and relaxed chat, she explained me how this all could happen:

“It’s a lot of things, you can’t just pin point
one thing,” she said. “You know, I work really hard and I know a lot of girl on
tour do too, but I just try to be one of the hardest workers and every day I
like to look back and make sure that I did my absolute best with whatever I had
and I think that’s probably the biggest factor in the way my tennis is going,
in my attitude.

“My team is great, you know, I love working with
my coach: he is fantastic, he believes in me, I believe in him and, you know,
he is not here with me this week, I have someone else with me and he is doing a
great job. You just plan you work and work you plan and that’s it.”

Fichman has a great defensive game,
characterized by a remarkable footwork and fast movements, but what has
improved a lot over the years is her anticipation and how much flatter her
shots are.

Despite being 1.63m tall (5ft4), her serve has
improved dramatically and so the power of her groundstrokes.

This combination of defensive and offensive
abilities has led to results equally as good on all surfaces and against a
variety of opponents.

“The biggest thing for me is that, you know, I
have my game style, I have my objectives and my goals when I’m playing, no
matter the surface,” she explained to me. “You know, you still stick to your
core values when you are playing; of course you have to make some few
adjustments, a few tweaks, that’s natural, and I do that at the best of my
ability.

“But in the end I focus on myself because that’s
all I can control, that’s really all I can ask out of myself today.”

Earlier this spring, as an epitome to this
improvements, she won her first $100,000 event in Cagnes-sur-Mer and then came very
close to upsetting Jelena Jankovic at Roland Garros.

Despite the loss, she took lots of positives
out of that match and, like you would expect from such a fierce personality, an
additional motivation for the future.

“It’s great to have had that experience, I’m
very disappointed still, that I lost, I thought that it was close and I had my
chances,” she admitted. “At 3-3 in the third, I had a break point I didn’t
convert, I learnt from it and next time I’ll just be more prepared, be ready.

“I look forward to playing her and other top
players again and learning from my mistakes and correcting it.

“I’m always looking forward, how can I get
better, how can I improve and I know that one of the things that comes along
with improving is you have better opponents. Obviously every single person you
play on every given day, you know, anything can happen, everyone is out there
to win and compete hard and fight, but of course as you play bigger events
you’re gonna play players that are more accomplished in their careers and I
expect a tough battle every time I’m gonna play such players.”

Despite
her lovely Canadian accent when speaking and her undeniably big love for her
home country –as much as she named “making history with the Canadian team” as
one of her best memories on a tennis court-, if you happen to follow one of her
matches, you will soon realize that her way of cheering for points comes from
somewhere else.

“My family, my background is eastern European:
they are Romanian and Hungarian, so “haide” is “c’mon” in Romanian, so… I don’t
know, it’s something that, growing up with my parents coming to matches
supporting me, sometimes they would just say something in another language and
I guess it just stuck with me.

“I don’t speak other than English, well, my
French is decent, my Hungarian is decent, you know, my Romanian ehmmm…” and she
paused herself with a funny face.

So where does she go from here?

“I don’t like putting numbers on things because
you can’t control numbers,” she said. “You know, it’s such a cliché-answer but
I just want to keep improving every day and I want to get more confident.

“I’m confident on my ability but I just want to
keep doing it every time I’m on court and keep pushing myself, you know, and
put myself in tougher situations and come out of it the best I can.

“I just want to keep playing bigger tournaments
and improving and learning and getting better and I think that, at the end of
the day, it is the most important thing. I think that is gonna get me to the
numbers and, you know, the ranking and the seeding and all that stuff that
comes with them.”

Surely tennis fans will look for her names
during the American summer on hard courts, including the home event of the Rogers
Cup in Montreal.
But, as she said, there is one event that cannot compare with others for her:

“I love playing at home, but I think my
favorite, the one that I enjoy, you know, I always look back on - and I think
it’s just the city and everything - I love the Us Open, I love New York City. It’s super
fun, it’s just a great place."

The most remarkable aspect of this tenacious
girl came about in the very last question I asked. There are lots of players
that have great work ethics, but it is not as frequent to see such a great
passion for the sport and yet respect for the opponents as she honestly
expressed.

She named many girls when I asked about her best
friends on tour: Maria Sanchez, Johanna Konta, Olga Savchuk.

Then she added: “I mean, let me be honest with
you, this is such a tough career path and I respect everybody that chooses to
do it. You know, because it is such a difficult career path, you needs some
remarkable people along the way and I’m fortunate to know a lot of people that
kinda are on the same path as me.

“I hope they see me in that way too and it’s
hard to just pinpoint a handful of people, but overall there are great people
on tour, guys and girls.”